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Avik Roy

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Avik Roy is the President of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP.org), a non-partisan, non-profit think tank that conducts original research on expanding opportunity to those who least have it. Roy’s work has been praised widely on both the right and the left. National Review has called him one of the nation’s “sharpest policy minds,” while the New York Times’ Paul Krugman described him as man of “personal and moral courage.”

He has advised three presidential candidates on policy, including Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney. As the Senior Advisor to Perry’s campaign in 2015, Roy was also the lead author of Gov. Perry’s major policy speeches. The Wall Street Journal called Perry’s address on intergenerational black poverty “the speech of the campaign so far.”

Roy also serves as the Opinion Editor at Forbes, where he writes on politics and policy, and manages The Apothecary, the influential Forbes blog on health care policy and entitlement reform. Hugh Hewitt has called Roy “the most influential conservative analyst on health care.” NBC’s Chuck Todd, on Meet the Press, said Roy was one “of the most thoughtful guys [who has] been debating” health care reform. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes calls The Apothecary “one of the best takes from conservatives on that set of issues.” Ezra Klein, editor-in-chief of Vox.com, called The Apothecary one of the few “blogs I disagree with [that] I check daily.”

Roy is the author of How Medicaid Fails the Poor, published by Encounter Books in 2013, and Transcending Obamacare: A Patient-Centered Plan for Near-Universal Coverage and Permanent Fiscal Solvency, a second edition of which was published in 2016 by FREOPP. He serves on the advisory board of the National Institute for Health Care Management, is a Senior Advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center, and co-chaired the Fixing Veterans Health Care PolicyTaskforce. Roy’s writing has also appeared in The WallStreet Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Atlantic, National Review, The Weekly Standard, and National Affairs, among other publications. He is a frequent guest on television news programs, including appearances on Fox News, Fox Business, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, CBS, PBS, and HBO.

He was born and raised near Detroit, Michigan, and graduated from high school in San Antonio, Texas. USA Today named him to its All-USA High School Academic First Team, honoring the top 20 high school seniors in the country. Roy was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied molecular biology, and the Yale University School of Medicine.